Originally Posted by
Kurt Busiek
I mean, we brought her back because we wanted to use her in interpersonal character drama in AVENGERS, and that interpersonal character drama was built on her dealing with particular problems, problems that grew out of her feeling broken and stressed, like she'd lost everything that mattered to her, including, as a final straw, the stars. So she turned to alcohol, which led to team issues and led to a connection to Tony, all of which gave us rich and engaging things to do.
Plus, I liked the Warbird costume.
The power change wasn't important because of her powers, primarily -- it was important because it set up all that character drama, and AVENGERS is (to my mind, anyway) a character drama book. And the Binary visual looks bad in the Warbird costume, and I think the Binary costume is functional but not all that interesting. And I dislike the name.
So if she was to stay Binary, she'd have had no reason to feel broken and stressed and would have had the character drama she did that gave us interesting interactions I wanted to write. Plus, I may have been motivated by really liking the character when she was in AVENGERS (and her own book) in the 70s, but without that, I wouldn't have been as interested.
So if that was the case, I'd have used someone else, someone I could do that kind of stuff with (and had a name I liked better).
And from there, her being back in AVENGERS is what gave her enough of a spotlight that other writers started using her, that she got her own series again, and that she got turned into Captain Marvel and got a movie. Without AVENGERS, I don't know if that happens.
It's certainly true that someone else could have brought her back, but she turned into Binary in 1982, and by 1998, 16 years later, she'd appeared as Binary less than 35 times, so it wasn't like other writers hadn't had a chance. They just weren't interested. Even Chris didn't use her very often.
So my best guess: If we didn't want to use her in AVENGERS, she wouldn't have come back to Earth, and she'd still be making random appearances here and there, but no series, no movie.
It was the character stuff that made me want to use her, and if she'd stayed Binary that character stuff doesn't happen.
Of course, now that she's a headliner again, any time Marvel wants to hook her back up to some cosmic energy source, they can do it.
I'm just glad I got to write her as Warbird, because even though the character arc we put her through wasn't comfortable for her, I really enjoyed writing it and putting her in the spotlight again.
kdb